Tam Harbert

A writer’s personal brand is becoming increasingly valuable. As a freelancer, I establish my brand through networking – both in person and via social networking. I spend a lot of time showing people what I know, what I do and how well I do it. I have a website. I blog. I post links to my stories and I comment on relevant news topics on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. My hope is that as people get to know me, they will come to appreciate my talent, knowledge and judgment, and thus when they need my services, will hire me.

Full-time staff writers and editors also are out there promoting their brands. They post under their own name on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to promote their articles. They also post professional items that are of interest to other journalists. And they post about their daily personal lives as well, just as I do.

We’re all trying to build up high numbers of high-quality connections, or “followers.” However, full-time employees are also promoting their employers. Employed journalists are expected to post stuff to promote certain articles in their publications and events sponsored by their publishers. So, whose followers are they? The writer’s or the employer’s?

That’s the question at the heart of a lawsuit brought against Noah Kravitz by his former employer. In 2010, Kravitz quit his job at Phonedog.com, a publisher of news on mobile devices and platforms, and took his 17,000 Twitter followers with him. The company is suing, saying the list of Twitter followers is a customer list, according to the New York Times.

There are some wrinkles here. Kravitz started the Twitter account and built up his followers while he was a full-time employee, under the Twitter handle Phonedog_Noah, according to the Times. When he left he changed his handle to NoahKravitz, but says that his employer agreed that he could take the followers if he twittered about the company from time to time. Apparently, though, there is nothing in writing.

Lawyers in several news reports say the Twitter handle is key to who’ll win the lawsuit. They imply that if he’d tweeted under his own name all along, then he would own the followers. But, would he? It’s one thing if the writer came to the job, bringing his followers with him, or if he had developed a following for tweeting about something besides his full-time employment. But what if he developed his expertise and his followers while at the employer? The employer may have a good argument for retaining the followers.

Freelancers may be a bit more aware of how our ability to attract an audience increases our value. My editors have told me they want me to write another story for them because of how many hits my stories get. I don’t have a particularly stellar social network, but most of my editors do want me to tweet and post about that story of mine that they are running this week. At writers’ conferences, I’ve heard book publishers say that they consider the number of Twitter followers and other social media numbers of the author when they are evaluating whether to publish a book. Who doesn’t want a ready-made readership? In fact, I won’t be surprised if that eventually becomes a standard question in job interviews.

So I’d like to poll my own social network on this topic. Does anyone know of other cases where a journalist left his job and tussled with his employer over his social network? For my full-time employed colleagues: do you think you’re more valuable to an employer because of your numerous followers? Does it help ensure your job security? Does it make you more attractive to your next employer? Freelancers: how helpful is your social network in impressing editors?

The more I hear about stubbornly high unemployment and the jobless recovery, the more convinced I am that we’re looking at things all wrong.

We’re in the midst of a national political obsession about creating jobs, but what exactly constitutes employment today? Fewer and fewer U.S. citizens hold a 9-to-5, 40-hour-a-week job with salary, healthcare, 401k plan and paid vacation. Even fewer will in the future, because what people do for a living, and how they do it, is changing.

As a freelancer, I work at home, set my own hours, try to get paid what I’m worth, buy my own health insurance, contribute to an IRA (no matching funds here) and make a reasonably good living. But some people still don’t consider that a real job. Including many freelancers. A colleague of mine, who was laid off from a magazine six months ago and is freelancing while looking for another position, still refers to herself as unemployed. My neighbor, who lost her job as an administrative assistant two years ago, is among the “long-term, chronically unemployed.” Despite her best efforts, she hasn’t been able to find another full-time administrative job. But she seems to stay fairly busy temping.

It’s not just full-time communications and administrative positions that are vanishing. As we buy more and more stuff online, we need fewer salespeople. And at my local grocery store, where I used to chat amiably with a cashier who got good pay and benefits, I now scan and bag my own groceries.

The truth is that much of what we call employment are jobs that were created by and structured for the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, they are no longer necessary. In the span of human history, most people worked for themselves (unless they were wealthy or enslaved), scratching out a living however they could. My grandparents, for example, were all farmers. In 1900, 41 percent of U.S. jobs were agricultural, according to government statistics.

Whatever you want to call it – – the contractor economy or free-agent nation – this new model of work requires individuals to have different skills and requires government to provide different services to support such a workforce. (National healthcare, anyone?) “People who are spending all their time trying to find that full-time job with benefits – some small portion will get them, but for the vast majority, these [freelance projects] are the jobs,” Sara Hororwitz, executive editor of the Freelancers Union, told Crain’s New York Business in an article earlier this year. (Note: Crain’s requires you to register for a free trial subscription.)

Yet our national leaders are looking backward, talking about creating last-century jobs, as if U.S. companies were going to start hiring full-time workers again. Even if the economy improves, corporations have learned that they don’t need employees. They only need contractors. In many cases, it’s going to be up to individuals to create their own jobs. That bodes well for those of us who have the skills and aptitude to become a company of one. For the rest of society, it’s time for the politicians and our government to face the realities of employment in the Digital Age and figure out how to nurture it.

Republicans and Corporate America frequently argue that reducing corporate taxes will lead to investment in the United States and the creation of more U.S. jobs. They say that if corporations could retain more of their earnings, they would spend it in ways that benefit the U.S. economy. First, that ignores the fact that American companies are sitting on mountains of cash. (The Federal Reserve reported that non-financial companies held more than $2 trillion in cash at the end of June, the highest level of cash as a percent of corporate assets since 1963, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

Secondly, it plays into the fallacy that today’s corporate entities are loyal to any nation-state. Although companies love to drape themselves in the U.S. flag whenever they lobby the government, there is no Corporate America. There are just huge multinational corporations with operations and sales all over the world, whose only goal is to make money. They will invest wherever they get the best deal, period. And that’s usually not in the United States.

So, when Congress gives them these special deals, we need to pay more attention to what happens afterward. A recent study by a congressional subcommittee does this. The only reason this wonky report, covering an arcane tax provision from 2004, caught my eye was because the technology industry had lobbied hard for it back in 2004, when I was covering public policy for Electronic Business magazine. Following my inner wonk, I downloaded and read “Repatriating Offshore Funds: 2004 Tax Windfall for Select Multinationals,” by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (You can download the report from this page on Senator Carl Levin’s website.)

By passing the American Jobs Act of 2004, Congress dropped the top corporate tax rate from 35 to 32 percent, which was largely symbolic because U.S. companies find ways to manipulate tax laws to significantly reduce their taxes. In fact, a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office found that 55 percent of U.S. companies paid no federal income taxes during a least one year out of a seven-year period studied.

More significantly, the 2004 legislation created a tax holiday, cutting for one year the tax rate on foreign earnings brought back to the United States, from 35 percent to just 5.25 percent. U.S. companies are taxed twice – at least theoretically – on profits earned abroad: once by the country in which they are earned and then again by America when those earnings are brought back to the States. Companies had argued that this double-taxation kept them from bringing such revenues back home and investing in the United States.

In early October, the Senate subcommittee published its report on what happened. Rather than creating U.S. jobs or increasing R&D spending, “the 2004 repatriation tax provision was followed by an increase in dollars spent on stock repurchases and executive compensation,” says the report. This, despite the fact that the law specifically prohibited the use of those funds for either of those expenditures. The tax break “provided a windfall for multinationals in a few industries without benefiting the U.S. economy as a whole.”

Of course, there’s no way to prove that the exact funds that these corporations repatriated were used to buy back stock or give CEOs huge raises. “Because money is fungible and corporations were not required to track expenditures of repatriated funds, it was impossible to determine if the surveyed corporations used their repatriated funds to increase planned expenditures for worker training and hiring in the United States or for R&D, or instead used the repatriated funds for expenses that had already been planned and would have been made in any event, and then used freed up funds to pay for prohibited purposes such as increased stock repurchases or executive compensation,” the report explains.

In my coverage back in 2004, I noted that the law required companies to draw up a “domestic reinvestment plan,” approved by the senior management and the board of directors, for how to spend the money. That plan could include worker hiring and training, infrastructure improvements, R&D, capital investments or “the financial stabilization of the corporation for purposes of job retention or creation.” I put that in because it sure sounded like a loophole. Indeed, I quoted a tax expert saying, “anyone in their right mind is going to make that plan as broad as possible” to cover all potential uses for the money.

The report shows that the repatriated profits most definitely did not go to investing in the United States. A total of 843 corporations repatriated $312 billion as a result of the tax break. The top 15 companies in terms of repatriated funds, which accounted for 52 percent of the total amount repatriated, included IBM, HP, Intel, Motorola, Microsoft and Oracle. Of those 15 companies, 66 percent recorded job losses from 2004 to 2007. Eighty percent increased their stock repurchases, by an average of 16 percent from 2004 to ‘05 and by an average of 38 percent from ‘05 to ‘06. Executive compensation at the 15 firms, which had increased 14 percent the year before the tax break, increased 27 percent in 2004-05 and another 30 percent in 2005-06.

Recently, the Republicans and big corporations have started another campaign to get taxes reduced or dropped on foreign earnings, using the same arguments as in 2004. I can only pray that our government and the American people look at the facts and the corporate track record this time around.

It’s scary enough that technology, specifically the Internet, makes it easy for publishers to replace U.S. journalists with low-cost writers from developing countries. Reuters, for example, uses staff in India to write financial news reports. Now comes the next wave: software that might just replace journalists entirely.

A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times ran a story on Narrative Science, a Chicago startup that has written software that takes data like sports stats or earnings numbers and churns out articles. Then last week, Slate.com, ran a series by Farhad Manjoo titled “Will Robots Steal Your Job?” The series describes how artificial intelligence is starting to do the work of highly-skilled professionals, including pharmacists, doctors and journalists. To top it all off, the New America Foundation here in D.C. just hosted a panel discussion, led by Manjoo, on the same topic.

At least two companies are developing such technology: Narrative Science and
Automated Insights in Durham, N.C. Both companies seem to be targeting the market for local sports reporting, such as high school football games. Publishers can use the software to turn game stats into news reports, effectively covering hundreds of local games that they never had the time or staff to cover before. It’s like a “robotic sports writer,” said Robbie Allen, Automated Insights CEO and founder, at the New America Foundation event.

The software could be a useful tool. I’ve done my share of stories on economic data, earnings numbers and market statistics. The work of sifting through all the numbers trying to identify the important trends is time-consuming, mind-numbing and depends on a certain amount of luck and intuition. Why not use this software to do in a split second what teams of journalists working for years could never do – analyze terabytes worth of numbers and identify trends and nuggets that are worth noting and digging into?

There’s plenty of data that publishers could feed into such software. In some cases, the publishers would get stories that would not otherwise get written. In other cases, they’d identify interesting trends that real journalists can use to develop in-depth articles.

In an example of the former, trade publisher Hanley Wood is using Narrative Science to provide monthly reports on hundreds of local housing markets on its website, something that it did not have the manpower to do before, according to the Times article.

As for generating story ideas, no one seems to be using the software for that, yet. In fact, these companies sometimes sound like they intend to put journalists out of business.

“In five years, a computer program will win a Pulitzer Prize — and I’ll be damned if it’s not our technology,” Kris Hammond, a founder of Narrative Science, told the Times. The comment is particularly disheartening because Hammond is a professor of journalism as well as computer science.

I doubt his claim. These products lack the creativity and imagination that professional journalists add to the equation. And I don’t think they’ll ever have that, because they are not human. People’s eyes glaze over when a story just reports numbers, even if those numbers are analyzed. Try reading an economic report from the federal government sometime.

This software may replace some reporters, and legitimately so, because some reporters don’t add any value. Writers, for example, who simply gather information, get a few comments from people and then regurgitate it onto the page, should probably start looking for another profession. As James W. Michaels, former editor of Forbes, was known to bellow: That is “not reporting, it’s stenography!”

These programs can even do sophisticated analysis that can match, or far surpass, our brain power when it comes to crunching numbers. “We can analyze and access more data than any one writer could ever do,” according to Allen.

What they cannot do, however, is include the human element. As every good journalist knows, a great story is just that – a story. About real people. Not about numbers. It includes the shades of gray that people must deal with in life. It illustrates their weakness and the pain of failure, the thrill and glory of achievement, the fear and depths of depression and disappointment.

The best business stories are not about how much profit a company made, but about the smart people that made the company so successful. The best sports writing is not about who won or lost the game, but how they did so and how the players and their fans reacted. Take a look at this piece from the Boston Globe, for example. Could a software program write this?

Can software conduct an effective interview? Good journalists ask probing questions and observe peoples’ reactions. They notice whether an interview subject is defensive, they sense when he may be lying or hiding something. They can get swept up by the excitement of an athlete describing how he pushed himself across the finish line, or feel the pain as a mother talks about how disease ravaged the health of her child. This affects not only what journalists write, but how they write it, in many subtle ways.

Maybe technology will ultimately be able to describe our complicated human condition as well as it crunches numbers. But for now, I think the journalism profession is relatively safe. Let’s welcome this software as another great tool in our toolbox, and use the extra time to concentrate on what we do best: telling great stories.

This Saturday, September 24th, is National Punctuation Day.

Many of us writers have pet peeves about punctuation and can cite ferocious battles with copy editors over things like semicolons, the serial comma and m-dashes. I’ve never been able to figure out the semicolon, for example. I know a few writers that use it, but why? Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style says, “If two or more clauses grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.” It takes several readings and some concentrated brain power to even understand what the gods of grammar are saying there. They helpfully give these examples:

Stevenson’s romances are entertaining; they are full of exciting adventures.
It is nearly half past five; we cannot reach town before dark.

Then in the next breath, they add that it is “equally correct to write each of these as two sentences, replacing the semicolons with periods.”

My point, ahem, exactly. Just as Strunk & White advise us to “omit needless words,” I think we should omit needless punctuation. Overusing it is either pretentious, as in the semicolon, or obnoxious, like when people insist on emphasizing everything with exclamation points!!! (These are usually the same people who INSIST ON YELLING AT US BY USING UPPERCASE LETTERS FOR EVERYTHING. (!!!)

Although we journalists love to interview people, fewer quotes (and thus quotation marks) are almost always better. Many writers use quotes out of laziness. After all, if you just quote what everyone else told you, then you don’t have to write, or think, much. Inexperienced reporters often use quotes out of “insecurity.” They don’t have the “confidence” to rephrase ideas more “succinctly” or analyze what’s been said. Quotes should be like jewelry. Too much is gaudy. But a few very fine, well-placed pieces will make the whole story sparkle.

If you care enough about punctuation to tell someone that it’s is not the same as its, you may want to celebrate this Saturday. A few websites that can liven up the party:

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. I especially recommend the greatest hits in the lower right-hand column.

A blog that chronicles the ongoing misuse of apostrophes.

The National Punctuation Day website has a great list of resources on punctuation, grammar and editing.

And finally, watch this old clip of how Victor Borge and Dean Martin punctuate their singing.

As a high-tech journalist, I often write about patent trolls in the electronics industry. A patent troll is a company that buys up patents and then goes looking for large, deep-pocketed corporations that might be infringing on those patents. The troll’s business model is to make money by squeezing settlement fees out of these corporations. Even if the corporation does not believe it’s infringing, it often settles because doing so is less expensive than going to court.

Now website owners and bloggers are encountering trolls of our own – copyright trolls. These companies either have or acquire copyright licenses on articles and images, then go scouring the Web for infringers. And they don’t have to look far; there seems to be a lot of infringing going on and very little policing. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. But rather than focus on large companies for which a settlement might be pocket change, the copyright trolls target small companies and individuals. Their business model is to pick on the relatively defenseless, threatening and intimidating people into paying settlements of a few thousand dollars.

Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC has been filing copyright infringement lawsuits against website owners, alleging infringement of newspaper articles and images published in the Las Vegas Review Journal and Denver Post. Righthaven is owned 50-50 by a Las Vegas attorney and by the family of the owner of the Las Vegas Review Journal, according to Righthaven Lawsuits. This website, which is not affiliated with Righthaven and is critical of the firm’s strategy, claims that as of mid-March, 251 cases had been filed and estimates that settlements had amounted to $420,000. Most of these suits have been against small entities, although there has been at least one case against a high-profile blog – the Drudge Report . Righthaven Lawsuits estimates that the average settlement is $3,500. The Drudge Report settled in February, but the amount was not reported.

PBS Media Shift recently ran a great analysis of Righthaven’s activities and possible defenses. What’s particularly disturbing is that website owners can be held liable even if the infringing material was posted in a comment by a third party.

Meanwhile stock photo company Getty Images has been going after individuals who, often unwittingly, post photos or other artwork without a license. For the last several years, Getty has been sending out letters informing website owners that they have violated a copyright and threatening to sue unless the owner pays a fee, usually around $1,000. Matthew Chan, an author and independent publisher who received such a letter in 2008, has started a website that explains, criticizes and follows the Getty litigation.

Traditionally, a company would first issue a “cease and desist” letter and then allow the alleged infringer the opportunity to take the material down before filing a suit. But these trolls are after the money. They send more than a cease and desist letter. They send an “insist” letter – insisting on a settlement fee or else they will take you to court.

We journalists often cite the fair use doctrine of the copyright law, which should in many circumstances cover our butts. But attorneys tell me that fair use is a very gray area and subject to interpretation. Besides, are you prepared to pay the tens of thousands of dollars it would cost to go to court and make the “fair use” argument? This is scary stuff. I hope that the courts ultimately repudiate this business model. In the meantime, I’m going to be very careful.

Last week I bought my first smart phone – an iPhone 4. I had been holding out for years, using a prehistoric LG Electronics flip phone circa 2005, on a pre-paid Verizon plan of $15 a month, because I don’t make many mobile phone calls. Most of my work is done at my desk in my home office. And even if I am on the road, I prefer to use a landline for phone interviews because the sound quality on most cell phones is crummy.

What I finally realized, however, is that I didn’t need the smart phone for the phone part. I needed it for the “smart” part, the computer capabilities that it provides. When I’m on the road, or even across the street shopping for groceries, I need to be available to my clients. If someone sends me an urgent e-mail, I need to respond right away.

The single most important reason I finally took the plunge is that a smart phone is a good backup system when my power goes out. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I live on a weak part of the electricity grid and am the victim of frequent power outages of fairly long duration. Short of getting a generator, the next best solution was to upgrade my phone so that I could continue to access my e-mail and the Web even if my lights went out. Since this access was the primary force driving me to upgrade, I wanted the most reliable wireless carrier. When the iPhone finally came out on Verizon Wireless, I decided the time was right.

What I didn’t expect was how useful the iPhone would be in so many different ways. For example, it not only serves as my most reliable connection to e-mail and the Internet (assuming I keep it charged), but it also may become a key component of my computer backup system. By using the cloud and the phone, I can have access to just about any file I need even if my power goes out. By storing my files and notes online at Dropbox, which provides a basic amount of storage for free, I still have access to them even when the power goes out. Granted, I can’t exactly edit and write stories with my thumbs on the iPhone keyboard, but I can at least send a story to an editor if need be.

The phone also gives me a great way to save not only files but also story ideas. I get these ideas all the time, but if I don’t write them down (and I almost never do) I forget them quickly and usually permanently. Now I can use the iPhone’s voice recorder to take note of that great idea and what sparked it.

I also didn’t realize how useful this pocket computer would be in my daily life. Using the Notes app, I keep a running list of things I need to pick up, such as office supplies and groceries. Now as long as I have the phone with me I also have those lists available, so when I happen to stop at Staples or the local grocery store I’m not wracking my brain to try to remember that I needed an HP 901 printer cartridge or a package of Shiitake mushrooms.

My iPhone also serves as my brag book about my son. Rather than pulling a three-year-old school photo out of my wallet, I can show people the latest pictures of him on Facebook, as well as some of his latest performances (he’s an actor and singer) on YouTube.

And he, an iPhone user for years, has turned me on to Pandora, an app that lets you build personalized music channels and also recommends new music that its algorithm says might suit your taste. So now I’m broadening my musical horizons while on the treadmill at the gym.

After resisting mobile phone technology for years, I’m now hooked. And I haven’t even made a phone call.

Ever since I started covering technology, in the mid-1980s, there’s been a perennial career story in the engineering and IT industry about age bias. Techies who reach a certain age, the story goes, often get laid off and replaced by one of the following, cheaper, alternatives: a) a recent college graduate, b) an immigrant with an H1B visa (often from India) or c) an engineer located offshore (often in India).

Middle-aged U.S. engineers have been howling, and suing, about this for decades. Employers argue that some older engineers just don’t keep up their technology skills. Workers argue that the employer just wants younger employees, who cost less. Just last year, a 54-year-old engineer brought an age-discrimination lawsuit against Google. At the trial, the engineer alleged that, despite good performance reviews, he was told that his opinions were obsolete and out of date. He was called slow, fuzzy, sluggish and an “old fuddy-duddy” by younger colleagues, he alleged. He was replaced with managers 15 to 20 years younger, transferred to a position of less responsibility and ultimately fired.

This is a tough problem, for both the employee and the employer. It’s not fair to be pushed aside when you reach 50, even though you’ve been a loyal employee and done a consistently good job. On the other hand, technology moves fast and the skills needed for particular jobs are changing. In today’s competitive environment, an employer needs to have the sharpest employees with the latest hot skills. And getting them for the least amount of money . . . well – that’s capitalism.

I’ve been on both sides of this problem. In the mid-1990s, when I was in my 30s, I supervised a writer who was in his 50s. We were revamping a magazine, taking it in a new editorial direction, and this employee just couldn’t get it. He seemed unable to produce the kind of work we needed. We worked with him for about a year, but to no avail. So, we fired him.

Today, I’m 51. I’m not as savvy as younger journalists in terms of the latest technology. My skills in using social media, producing multimedia stories or even texting are not as sharp as a 30-year-old’s. Sometimes, I just don’t “get it.”

So, my experience in tech journalism isn’t so different from those engineers. In fact, as technology pervades various types of jobs throughout our economy, the same age-related employment problems about which engineers have long complained will pop up in all sorts of careers. It’s been happening in journalism for a while. Reuters has been outsourcing at least some low-level journalism jobs to India for years. I don’t see many H1B visa-holders replacing U.S. journalists, but I do see plenty of senior editorial staff losing their jobs, although it’s more often because their publication has died than because they are being replaced. And the staff and management of new media companies and online publications? I bet most are in their 20s and early 30s.

In our Internet-flattened world, this will happen to a lot of us boomers. Even lawyers. We have to figure out how to deal with it. My plan is to keep moving up the value chain, doing more sophisticated reporting and writing that requires experience, perspective and in-depth knowledge. At the same time, I try to keep up with the latest developments in the media business and try to incorporate new skills that will keep me relevant in this changing market. I’m lucky to be a freelancer who works primarily by phone and Internet. It means that my employers judge me by my work, not by my age, not by my appearance nor even by my ability to text (at least not yet). To rephrase that iconic New Yorker cartoon, on the Internet nobody knows you’re over 50. I hope I can keep it that way.

If you’re a freelancer and you’re not familiar with Demand Media, then you haven’t checked the listings on JournalismJobs.com and MediaBistro for years. If you’re not a freelancer, you’ve seen lots of Demand Media’s products, although you probably haven’t realized it. Do a Google search on just about anything, and you’ll find them. Go ahead and search on “best way to wash a dog,” right now. See the results that come up from eHow.com (two of the first four listings)? That’s just one of the sites owned by Demand Media.

Demand Media, along with other companies like Suite 101, Associated Content and About.com, is a content farm, a new type of media company that bases its business model on search engine optimization (SEO). Most freelancers don’t like these companies and their business models. First of all, they pay a pittance, usually $15 to $20 per article. Many of the people who write for these sites are novice writers, not journalists, willing to take such low wages just to get published. Second, these companies don’t value good writing nor do they offer good service to the reader. The content farm’s chief aim is to mass-produce chunks of text designed to rank highly on Google. The higher an article ranks on Google, the more readers it drives to Demand Media sites, thus generating large numbers of page views, which means more advertising dollars. It doesn’t matter whether the information is accurate or useful, whether the article is written well, or even if it makes any sense whatsoever. What matters is that the article is stuffed with key words and that the writer uses other tricks that will get the article ranked highly in Google search results.

This is known as search engine optimization (SEO). It’s a trend that prickles the skin of good journalists everywhere who are under pressure from the bean counters to “optimize” their articles. “Building Web traffic through ‘search engine optimization’ has become a major part of a journalist’s job,” writes The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro in a recent column. It’s a symptom of the fact that most publications haven’t yet figured out how to make money by publishing quality editorial on the Web. It’s a desperate attempt to prop up their advertising revenues.

Many of my colleagues – both staff and freelance – are experiencing this to some degree. The good news, however, is that older, established publications – ones that existed before the Internet – are more discerning about it. They want high-quality editorial first, then they tweak it with SEO.

“My editors are very sensitive to anything that looks or feels like whoring out a story,” says one client. “Yet at the same time you want your work to be seen, so it’s yet another one of those fine lines. We aren’t putting EgyptKatyPerrySarahPalinViagra in the first line of every story (or in the keywords, which some even respectable publications do) but we did have a two-hour edit seminar from an outside firm on SEO tactics.”

On the other hand, a freelance colleague who experimented with Demand Media gave up after she tried to both write a good story AND adhere to the company’s editorial guidelines. “You’ve only got, like, 250 words, and here they are telling you what words to use,” and where, she says.

Demand Media’s recent initial public offering seemed to be a vote of confidence in the SEO-based business model. As of Feb. 7, the share price was $19, giving the company a market capitalization of around $1.6 billion. However, Demand Media has yet to turn a profit. For the first nine months of 2010, it lost $6.3 million, according to Folio.

Meanwhile, Google is taking aim at these companies. As content farms have emerged, they’ve flooded the Internet with crappy articles, which makes Google’s search service less useful. Consumers are not finding the information they want and need, and they are complaining. “We hear the feedback from the Web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content,” blogged Matt Cutts, Google search engineer, in January. The company plans to adjust its algorithm to try to strip out some of this drivel.

Think about this for a minute. The content farms use a business model that generates articles that people don’t like, even though these companies are targeting topics that people are interested in. It’s an SEO shell game of keywords that leaves readers dissatisfied and frustrated. It’s not making money. And it’s in Google’s crosshairs. Does this sound like a recipe for success?

I hope the next couple of years brings the failure of these farms and proves that to grow good content, you need to start with good ingredients.

I’m probably one of the only people in my neighborhood that hasn’t upgraded to a flat-panel TV. There, taking up a good portion of my living room, is the big-old-honking Sony.

Why haven’t I gotten rid of the beast? For one thing, it still works fine. And besides, I don’t watch that much TV.

OK, the real reason is fear. Setting up a new TV has become more complicated and intimidating than setting up a computer. I remember the days of having to reinstall software, update drivers, and doing dozens of other things by trial and error to get PCs to work. It didn’t take hours; it took days. But the computer industry has improved the process immensely. It’s still not idiot-proof, but at least I don’t need a degree in computer science to do it.

Meanwhile, TVs have moved in the other direction. Rather than just plugging them in and turning them on, you have to be an electronics engineer to get everything connected and playing well together.

My sister’s experience is a perfect example. Last spring, she and her husband bought a 46-inch flat-screen HDTV. With a beautiful picture like that, of course they wanted to complement it with the best audio and video components. But integrating all the components – Blu-Ray player, stereo receiver, CD player, cable and Internet – turned into what she calls her “high-end nightmare.”

The Best Buy salesman assured them that the Geek Squad could do it all. The Geeks came, they installed and connected everything, quickly demonstrated how everything worked, and then they were gone. But the head geek reassuringly left them his card, so they could call him personally if they had any problems.

An hour later, they had problems, and thus began “six months of hellish trial and error.” There was finger pointing between the Geek Squad and Comcast, then the head geek simply ignored my sister’s voicemails. Comcast came and switched out the cable box several times before one of the technicians finally admitted that the Comcast remote didn’t communicate with several of the new components. My sister and brother-in-law were on their own.

Once they got the BluRay player hooked up and tried to play a BluRay disc from Netflix, an error message popped up on the TV screen saying the BluRay player required a software upgrade. They hadn’t planned to connect the TV to the Internet yet, but now they had to in order to get the upgrade they needed. But the TV wouldn’t connect with their WiFi network. They had to call in a home multimedia specialist, at $140 an hour, and even he had trouble making it work.

Now, six months later, they’ve mostly figured it out. But they need four different remotes, depending on what component they’re trying to control. They keep notes near the TV so they can remember how to turn various components on and off. And they can’t play a simple audio CD without the TV monitor booting up and running rhythmic patterns of color to illustrate the music.

The total cost of the TV, components and fees for various technicians: more than $2,500. The time spent tinkering in frustration and chasing after the Geek Squad, Comcast and other technicians: 50-plus hours. “The sheer mental anguish – priceless,” my sister deadpans.

Who needs that? That’s why I’m buying a new computer this year. In fact, I may even throw out the old Sony and put the new PC in the living room. After all, with the PC, it’s easy to watch movies and TV shows, listen to my music and tune into the radio. Oh, and did I mention it can access the Internet, too?